ISTANBUL - More than one million people took part in a mass rally here Sunday in support of secularism and democracy amid a tense stand-off between the Islamist-rooted government and the army over presidential elections.

The Istanbul demonstration followed a similar one in Ankara on April 14 that attracted up to 1.5 million people, according to some estimates.

Tensions rose after Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, a former Islamist from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), narrowly missed becoming the country's next president in a first round of voting in parliament on Friday.

The AKP dominates the 550-seat parliament, but does not have the required two-thirds majority to get Gul elected in the first two rounds of voting ...

The opposition boycotted the vote because of Gul's Islamist past and because they were not consulted on his candiacy for the non-partisan post.

The army, which has carried out three coups in the past, issued a statement saying it was determined to protect Turkey's secular system and was ready to take action if the need arose, making it clear, according to many analysts, that Gul's candidacy was not welcome ...

The prospect of Gul becoming head of state has alarmed secularists who fear the strict separation of state and religion will be eroded and Islam will creep into all fields of life if he is elected ...

Gul and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan served in now-defunct Islamist parties before setting up the AKP in 2001.

They say they have disawoved their Islamist roots and are now committed to secular principles.

But secularists suspect the AKP of harbouring a secret Islamic agenda, citing its unsuccessful attempts to criminalise adultery, restrict alcohol sales and lift a ban on Islamic headscarves in government offices.

They fear the government will have a free hand to implement Islamist policies if the party controls the presidency ...

"Turkey either giving up on secularism or suspending democracy are two doomsday scenarios impossible to choose between," the popular daily Vatan said.

This begs the question "what lessons can Australia learn from this", in light of our rapidly expanding Muslim population. That depends what has caused the shift in power towards an Islamic party. Turkey is a Muslim population, but pulled itself out of sharia-law years ago and has managed to remain secular. So what has changed? I don't know yet, but I can guess either:

the percentage of population of non-secular Muslims has increased, or

public opinion has swayed to hard-line Muslim values

If population is the cause then, in a democracy, "demography is destiny". If public opinion has swayed, then it is a failure to control the ideas of fundamentalists. You either have to limit their population, or control their ideas and behaviour.

With the exploding birthrates of non-secular Muslims, much of Europe is headed down a similar road to Islamic rule. Who needs a war when they can "conquer us with their bellies".

If you won’t limit the non-secular Muslim population in your democracy (or their ideas), then they will eventually rule. Putting your faith in laws like “we are secular” ultimately comes down to a plea for mercy when the non-secular Muslims gain control. It won’t last.

Australia has to somehow halt our exploding Muslim population, or one day we will see kids walking down the street in a rally with pictures of Edmund Barton pleading “but we are secular Mr Muslim - please let us be”.

Either halt the Muslim population, or radically transform Islam in Australia into a mere shadow of itself (if that is possible), or hope the military comes to save you at the last minute, or do nothing and leave it to our kids to get on their knees and submit. There is no easy road.

"But among all the lamentations only Michel Gurfinkiel’s recent analysis in Commentary got to the underlying reality: Since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, there have been two Turkeys: the Turks of Rumelia, or European Turkey, and the Turks of Anatolia, or Asia Minor. Kemal Ataturk was from Rumelia and so were most of his supporters, and they imposed the modern Turkish Republic on a somewhat relunctant Anatolia, where Ataturk’s distinction between the state and Islam was never accepted. In its 80-year history, the population has increased from 14 million in 1923 to 70 million today, but the vast bulk of that population growth has come from Anatolia, whose population has migrated from the rural hinterland to overwhelm the once solidly Kemalist cities. Ataturk’s modern secular Turkey has simply been outbred by fiercely Islamic Turkey. That’s a lesson in demography from an all-Muslim sample: no pasty white blokes were involved.So the fact that Muslim fertility is declining in Tunisia is no consolation: all that will do, as in Turkey, is remove moderate Muslims from the equation too early in the game."

A Belgian auto parts supplier has forbidden its workers to speak any language other than Dutch, even during their lunch break, and employees could be fired if they disobey.

"We have people from Italy, India, Poland, Algeria here. It's to avoid cliques forming here and there," said Geert Vermote, human resources manager of HP Pelzer in the town of Genk in Belgium's Dutch-speaking Flanders region.

Language is a sensitive topic in Belgium, particularly in Flanders where locals and politicians are keen to promote the use of Dutch and prevent the encroachment of the country's other main language, French.

Two staff at HP Pelzer have so far received written warnings, out of a workforce of 125 employees, some 70 percent of whom are of foreign origin. Three warnings would lead to a worker being fired.

Belgian newspaper De Standaard reported Thursday that workers of Turkish origin, who make up some 35 percent of the company's workforce, felt the rule was aimed against them and had asked the union to intervene.

Vermote said the rule had been agreed with the company's works council and said the "three strikes" rule applied to warnings of any form.

"It's really nothing other than other rules we have, such as a ban on smoking," he said.

... Of course one sick criminal does not define a whole community. Of course most Sudanese would be utterly horrified by this attack. Of course many Sudanese will make excellent contributions to this country. Of course, and of course and of course.

But it’s also clear that a worrying number of Sudanese immigrants - coming from a very different culture and a much poorer country with much lower standards of education - are struggling to make their way here and to integrate.

A state school principal has also told me how very hard she’s found it to integrate the African students in her school, given how few of them have any English or much respect for authority. What makes her challenge worse, she says, is that she has so many of them, leading then naturally to form a “gang” rather than be forced to assimilate.

We can ignore all this, as we usually, do and shout “racist” at those who point out that we have a problem.

But we need to rethink just how - or even whether - we resettle immigrants whose culture is so very, very different.

... On 3AW, a Sudanese community spokeswoman asks for understanding:

The implication of this journey [as a refugee] could make people prone to be violent.

The young policeman was angry, and cautious. He knew what he was saying was dangerous and there was no way he would put his name to it. But it had to be said:

The Sudanese kids are a real problem. You pull them over in the car. They are drunk. They don't have a licence. Some of them are only 14. You tell them they'll be charged and they laugh at you. At home, they'd be shot or beaten. Whatever we do to them just doesn't matter. The next day, there they are again, out on the road. Chances are they'll be drunk or off their heads on something ...

There was and is a serious and continuing problem with unlicensed and drunk driving among Sudanese refugees in Melbourne. The courts have seen the bloody evidence.

Remember Taban Gany? In May 2005, 18 months after arriving from Sudan, he got drunk and drove his car into a Dandenong school yard, injuring six children. He had been caught drink driving twice before. He had no licence.

But this problem does not end on the roads. There is now increasing evidence of a culture of violence imported to this country with some refugees. There is no point dodging around that fact for fear of being called racist ...

How many potential rapists, drunk drivers or lunatic gang members, Sudanese or otherwise, are being imported through a determination to be compassionate? And how far does that compassion stretch before it snaps into a backlash? ...

There are now about 18,000 Sudanese living in Victoria ... there is a problem and evidence of it is not racially based or simply anecdotal. Youth worker Les Twentyman has identified it and calls this a "divided nation."

The Police Association has identified it and describes the Sudanese trouble makers in particular as being "lawless." ...

It is not enough to say that a violent drug taking rapist has "slipped through the system", as Mr Andrews describes it. The system must be tightened. It is not enough to say the Federal Government is "putting in place" programs to help these people avoid breaking the law ...

For the right reasons, this Government welcomed these people to Australia, but it must now recognise it has imported with them an unexpected degree of dislocation, violence, and danger ... But government policy has caused this danger. It must find answers.

... with this rate of immigration, will the UK still be a developed country in 2050? Our infrastructure will surely be put under immense pressure by all these extra people. And there's the simple question whether a country that imports millions and millions of ill-educated and culturally backward people (as most of these immigrants are and will be) can avoid being sucked down into a general intellectual and cultural malaise itself? I somehow doubt it.

Sweden is one of the worst hit countries in Europe of Muslim immigration and Political Correctness. Now, the police themselves have publicly admitted that they no longer control one of Sweden's major cities. I have made some exclusive translations from Swedish media. They show the future of Eurabia unless Europeans wake up.

I’ve seen the future of Eurabia, and it’s called 'Sweden.' Malmø is Sweden’s third largest city, after Stockholm and Gothenburg. Once-peaceful Sweden, home of ABBA, IKEA and the Nobel Prize, is increasingly looking like the Middle East on a bad day. More ...

(Fox News, November 2004)

Because Sweden has some of the most liberal asylum laws in Europe, one quarter of Malmo's 250,000 population is now Muslim, changing the face and the idea of what it means to be Swedish. Asylum seekers may bring spouses, brothers and grandparents with them. Civil servants say the city is swamped.

"You have 1,000 students in a Swedish school. How many are Swedes? Two," said Lars Birgersson, principal of the Rosengrad School ...

However, they are the most rapidly growing segment of Swedish society — outsiders who are already inside, posing a challenge to legendary Swedish tolerance that has now been stretched to the breaking point.

Malmo's main mosque was recently set ablaze by arsonists. When firefighters arrived on the scene, they were attacked by stone throwers. More ...

Pundits who predict that Western Europe is about to witness a shift to the anti-immigrant right are mistaken. This trend will be over by the end of the decade, when the impact of the immigrant vote will move European politics dramatically to the left. The right’s chances of winning elections are dwindling. The anti-immigrant right realizes this.

... let’s say for the sake of discussion that Belien is right and that it is over. It would be over in the sense that the current suicidal European order—in which European elites “manage” the gradual Islamization of Europe, thinking they can remain in control of the process, while tiny and powerless European right-wing parties impotently protest the process—is doomed. But if, as Belien predicts will be the case within a few years, European Europe finds itself not merely threatened by Islamization but actually under the thumb of a Leftist-Islamist Coalition regime, then out of that catastrophe there could arise a new European right, different from any seen before, which knows that it has lost control of its civilization, and knows that it has no alternative but to fight to win it back. As I’ve said before, it is possible that only real defeat can make Europeans wake up to reality.

YOUNG Somali refugees in Melbourne are being seduced by Muslim extremists, a Somali community leader has warned.

Herse Hilole, a Sydney community leader and Islamic scholar, fears the recruits could be used in terrorism attacks in Australia.

He said some Somalis were being influenced by radical Lebanese from a hardline Wahhabi group ...

He told The Age extremists from Somalia visited last year to gather money and support and that one of their most important allies was the Somali mosque in North Melbourne ...

Dr Hilole says in his speech that Islamist extremists are using terrorist tactics in Somalia, trying to create an insurgency similar to Iraq, and have found many supporters in Australia ...

Dr Hilole told The Age that Muslim extremists fell into two groups in Australia: those promoting political Islam, such as Sheikh Taj al-Din al-Hilali, and those who supported jihad, such as Salafis (ultra-conservatives), who controlled some mosques and schools.

He said Somalis who supported the Islamic Courts movement, and there were many, did not want to integrate with Australian society.

"There was a group in Melbourne affiliated with al-Ittihad (the Islamic Courts) under the name al-Ansar, which was closed several times by Australian intelligence and security agencies. Now they are hiding in the community."

In an apocalyptic vision of security dangers, Rear Admiral Chris Parry said future migrations would be comparable to the Goths and Vandals while north African "barbary" pirates could be attacking yachts and beaches in the Mediterranean within 10 years.

Europe, including Britain, could be undermined by large immigrant groups with little allegiance to their host countries — a "reverse colonisation" as Parry described it. These groups would stay connected to their homelands by the internet and cheap flights. The idea of assimilation was becoming redundant, he said ...

If a security breakdown occurred, he said, it was likely to be brought on by environmental destruction and a population boom, coupled with technology and radical Islam. The result for Britain and Europe, Parry warned, could be "like the 5th century Roman empire facing the Goths and the Vandals".

Parry pointed to the mass migration which disaster in the Third World could unleash. "The diaspora issue is one of my biggest current concerns," he said. "Globalisation makes assimilation seem redundant and old-fashioned . . . [the process] acts as a sort of reverse colonisation, where groups of people are self-contained, going back and forth between their countries, exploiting sophisticated networks and using instant communication on phones and the internet." ...

Parry, based in Shrivenham, Wiltshire, presented his vision at the Royal United Services Institute in central London. He identified the most dangerous flashpoints by overlaying maps showing the regions most threatened by factors such as agricultural decline, booming youth populations, water shortages, rising sea levels and radical Islam ...

The effects will be magnified as borders become more porous and some areas sink beyond effective government control ...

The competition for resources, Parry argues, may lead to a return to "industrial warfare" as countries with large and growing male populations mobilise armies, even including cavalry, while acquiring high-technology weaponry from the West.

The subsequent mass population movements, Parry argues, could lead to the "Rome scenario". The western Roman empire collapsed in the 4th and 5th centuries as groups such as Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Suevi, Huns and Vandals surged over its borders. The process culminated in the sack of Rome in 455 by Geiseric the Lame, king of the Alans and Vandals, in an invasion from north Africa.

Parry estimated at the conference there were already more than 70 diasporas in Britain.

In the future, he believes, large groups that become established in Britain and Europe after mass migration may develop "communities of interest" with unstable or anti-western regions.

Any technological advantage developed to deal with the threats was unlikely to last. I don’t think we can win in cyberspace — it’s like the weather — but we need to have a raincoat and an umbrella to deal with the effects," said Parry.

(Fjordman, via Democracy Frontline - April 2007)You cannot defeat Islamism without defeating Islam. It is like trying to fight Communism while praising Marxist economic theories! In the Cold War, the US and its allies did not hesitate to argue that Marxism is a false ideology. Marx’s ideas are wrong and cannot lead mankind to a better future. The democratic world must make the same case against Islam. Otherwise, we cannot win without relying heavily on the military component, which means more bloodshed. Perhaps we cannot win at all.

Remember what Sun Wu said in his classic, “The Art of War”. The side with the higher moral standing is more likely to win. To do this, a leader must convince his people that their cause is just. You cannot persuade your people to make exertions if they do not understand what they are up against. Thus the burden of ideological warfare falls on groups like FFI.More ...

And all this was, of course, brought to my mind by the story of these British servicemen captured by the Iranians. To return to my earlier question: What on earth has happened to the British?

What has happened is multiculturalism. The British no longer feel that contempt for other nations that sustained them for so many centuries. Or, if they feel it, they guiltily suppress that feeling, as being flagitiously “racist.” ...

If you read that passage through with attention, you will know how our future is going to unfold. That private of the Buffs declared “that he would not prostrate himself before any Chinaman alive.” His early 21st-century equivalent would prostrate himself without being asked. We have actually, I think, reached the point at which prostration is more or less reflexive. Nor would any modern person be so insensitive as to say “Chinaman,” a word nowadays considered to be unspeakably insulting—Ted Turner used it the other day, and had to issue a public apology to Persons of Chineseness everywhere.

And that, ladies and gents, is why our civilization is a goner ...

The tragedy—and I am using that word in its full and proper meaning—the tragedy is, that these westernized Muslims are banging their heads against that Orwell quote. They have signed on to the modern world and its multi-culti fantasies. There was plenty of courage and good sense on display at St. Petersburg, but not much of those energizing principles Orwell spoke about: “racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war.” It’s the jihadis who have those.

The great genius of the English-speaking peoples was in holding the two sets of ideas in their minds at the same time: both “racial pride, leader-worship (well, to be fair to the Anglosphere, we never really went for that one), religious belief, love of war,” and “the inviolable freedom of the individual conscience ... the equality of all human persons.” This was quite a trick, as the two sets of principles actually contradict each other. It was Orwell himself who gave us the word “doublethink.”

(from OzConservative, April 2007)George Orwell’s remarks on patriotism, written in August 1941 :

What has kept England on its feet during the past year? In part, no doubt, some vague idea about a better future, but chiefly the atavistic emotion of patriotism, the ingrained feeling of the English-speaking peoples that they are superior to foreigners. For the last twenty years the main object of English left-wing intellectuals has been to break this feeling down, and if they had succeeded, we might be watching the SS men patrolling the London streets at this moment. Similarly, why are the Russians fighting like tigers against the German invasion? In part, perhaps, for some half-remembered ideal of Utopian Socialism, but chiefly in defence of Holy Russia (the “sacred soil of the Fatherland”, etc etc), which Stalin has revived in an only slightly altered form.

The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions—racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war—which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action.

At least 1600 British muslims plotting terrorist violence. Two hundred terror networks. Thirty "Priority 1" plots at present. And this is when muslims are still, relatively speaking, a small minority in Britain. What can we expect when they are a third, or a half the population? Isn't it obvious that this can't be tolerated? The British intelligence services may be able to keep track of 1600 terrorists and 30 major plots at once (though I doubt it), but there is a point at which it becomes impossible to keep track of these people.

And none of this would have been necessary except for the leftist insistence on opening our nations to every kind of alien people from around the world. More ...

Actually, I think the premiers are worse than Howard, although his environmental credentials are hardly stellar. They talk endlessly about water shortages, citizens are harangued about saving the precious liquid, and quotas imposed and then, literally in the next sentence, the same premiers are talking about "the need to increase population," as though more people won't need more water.

Take Victoria's Steve Bracks: in one breath he talks about water shortages and dam levels being dangerously low, and in the next says Melbourne needs a million more people by 2025. Or Jon Stanhope of the ACT: he preaches jeremiads on Canberra's dire water shortage, and then announces four new Canberra suburbs full of Mac-mansions.

One of the unmentionable (and nowadays politically incorrect) questions in Australia is how many people the continent can sustain while retaining some respect for the integrity of the landscape. Political parties, including the Greens, scamper for cover the moment population policy is mentioned. But Australia is not infinite; there is a limit to our productive capacity, and we may well have already exceeded it. More ...

What gives us a sense of wellbeing? The results of some Australian research might surprise you ... The survey ... connected electorates with high ethnic diversity to low personal wellbeing. The research did not, therefore, support the orthodox idea that we are enriched in our personal lives by multicultural diversity. More ...

Robert Putnam, October 2006And what is happening to Los Angeles? According to Robert Putnam, Harvard political scientist and author of "Bowling Alone," the trust among people in "this most diverse human habitation in human history" is now at rock bottom, the lowest anywhere he could find.

"In the presence of diversity," said Putnam, "we hunker down. We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it's not just that we don't trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities we don't trust people who look like us". The more people of different races that live in a community, the greater the loss of trust, said Putnam. "They don't trust the local mayor, they don't trust the local paper, they don't trust other people, and they don't trust institutions. ... The only thing there is more of is protest marches and TV watching".

Welcome to the Brave New World our elites are creating for our children, as they consign the America we grew up in to the compost heap of history.

Paul Craig Roberts, February 2006The declines in some manufacturing sectors have more in common with a country undergoing saturation bombing during war than with a super-economy that is "the envy of the world".

The knowledge jobs that were supposed to take the place of lost manufacturing jobs in the globalized "new economy" never appeared. The information sector lost 17% of its jobs, with the telecommunications work force declining by 25%.

Offshore outsourcing and offshore production have left the US awash with unemployment among the highly educated. More ...

(January 2007, The Australian)VICTORIAN police are being urged to set up a special taskforce to tackle gang violence and lawlessness among young African migrants living in Melbourne's inner-city housing commission estates.

The push - led by rank-and-file police and terrified neighbours - is backed by the state's powerful police union, which claims sections of the African community need to be "properly educated" in Australian values.

"The Sudanese are very difficult to deal with - they come from a lawlessbackground and they really have to be properly educated about Australiansociety's standards," the Police Association secretary, Senior Sergeant PaulMullett, told The Australian.

Police in Melbourne's inner north and social workers are demanding resources to help deal with the problem.

"What's actually emerging in Victoria is the establishment of in particularyouth gangs and ethnic gangs, and our members just don't have the resourcingsupport to proactively police these gangs," Sergeant Mullett said

Police union members who worked around the high-rise public housing blocks in areas such as Flemington and Fitzroy were worried about their safety and becoming more reluctant to work there, he said.

He called for a special taskforce or for departments to "establish taskforces of their own" to tackle gang activity.

Sergeant Mullett warned that more proactive police programs were needed to build better communication with African communities and prevent group violence from escalating to the levels seen in Sydney's Cronulla riots ...

Youth worker Les Twentyman said while there were African gangs involved in crime and violence, there were also gangs from other ethnic origins such as Pacific Islanders and Lebanese. He said gangs were an escalating problem that would eventually lead to "no-go zones" in Melbourne if they were not properly addressed by police. More ...

A woman has been arrested by police following a serious motor vehicle crash at Kogarah that has left a woman dead.

It’s believed a small red sedan allegedly travelling west along Railway Parade, has mounted the kerb, striking a group of pedestrians waiting at a nearby bus stop. As many as eleven people have been injured, including a toddler and infant who were taken to St George Hospital in a serious condition. The infant has since been transferred to Westmead Hospital.

Nine other pedestrians have been taken to various hospitals suffering injuries including head injuries, fractures, and lacerations.

A 20-year-old Orange woman sustained severe head and chest injuries and was taken to St George Hospital for treatment, where she died earlier this afternoon.

The Learner driver, a 42-year-old Arncliffe woman has been arrested by police and is currently under police guard at St George Hospital suffering minor injuries. A 60-year-old male passenger assisted police with inquiries and has since been released pending further investigations. More ...

And ...

The driver, a Sudanese widow and mother of seven children aged between 13 and 25, had just left St George Hospital after visiting her son when the crash happened. She had been learning to drive after the recent death of her husband and had asked her former neighbour for a driving lesson. More ...See Video ...

January 2007A SUDANESE refugee who embarked on a three-day rape spree and sliced an elderly woman's throat will serve at least the next 17 years in jail. Hakeem Hakeem, 21, was yesterday sentenced to 24 years' jail, with a non-parole period of 17 years, for a string of depraved sexual attacks in Melbourne's southeast in March 2005.

The Supreme Court heard that, just one month after arriving in Australia, Hakeem set out on a drug and alcohol-fuelled campaign of terror on the streets of Dandenong.

After chroming and injecting amphetamines, Hakeem and an associate entered a derelict Scout hall on March 10, 2005, dragged a 16-year-old girl to a toilet and repeatedly raped her.

A day later, Hakeem broke into the home of a 63-year-old woman and punched her head and face repeatedly, before biting her and raping her at knifepoint.

With the 2006 election, America appears to have reached the tipping point on free trade, as it has on immigration and military intervention to promote democracy. Anxiety, and fear of jobs lost to India and China, seems a more powerful emotion than gratitude for the inexpensive goods at Wal-Mart. The bribe Corporate America has offered Working America - a cornucopia of consumer goods in return for surrendering U.S. sovereignty, economic security and industrial primacy - is being rejected.

What is ahead is not difficult to predict. But if the free-trade era is over, what will succeed it? ... A new era of economic nationalism.

A rising spirit of nationalism is evident everywhere in this election, not simply in the economic realm. Americans are weary of sacrificing their soldier-sons for Iraqi democracy. They are weary of shelling out foreign aid to regimes that endlessly hector America at the United Nations. They are tired of sacrificing the interests of American workers on the altar of an abstraction called the Global Economy. They are fed up with allies long on advice and short on assistance.

Other leaders in other lands look out for what they think is best for their nations and people. Abstractions such as globalism and free trade take a back seat when national interests are involved.

China and Japan manipulate their currencies and tax polices to promote exports, cut imports and run trade surpluses at America's expense. Europeans protect their farms and farmers. Gulf Arabs and OPEC nations run an oil cartel to keep prices high and siphon off the wealth of the West. Russians have decided to look out for Mother Russia first and erect a natural gas cartel to rival OPEC. In Latin America, Bush's Free Trade Association of the Americas is dead.

We are entered upon a new era, a nationalist era, and it will not be long before the voices of that era begin to be heard. More ...